Because they don't have to. Apple is Big Picure. They're not worried about sweeping up the last of the crumbs.
Because you threw out that $8 million figure as if it was relevant to your argument. It wasn't. It was just one big non sequitur.
Remind me not to hire you for my marketing team.
Pono wasn't a response to any demand from the market place. Pono and the Kickstarter campaign was all about creating demand through marketing. And it was creating a demand for a dubious "product" (i.e. hi-res). To date I am not aware of anyone who has demonstrated unambiguously that anyone can hear the difference between 16/44 and 24/96-192.
Good to hear. Coincidentally I'm planning on launching one myself.
You're right. I've only been involved with the audiophile community for over 30 years. I don't know anything about it.
"A lot" is relative.
That's what I have been saying. Haven't you been listening? Apple isn't interested in small potatoes.
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"Because they don't have to. Apple is big picture. They're not worried about sweeping up the last of the crumbs"
Let's throw out the moniker "audiophile" and focus on what we're
really talking about. Sales of high-end audio equipment which benefit from high-rez music files. You may argue that just because someone buys the high-end system, they don't care or even know about streaming quality. But it's sales 101. Got the nice car? Use the nice gas, get the nice hand-wax, buy the nice roadside protection plan. People want their investments to perform for them, period. High-rez music today is a selling point not just for people who describe themselves as audiophiles, but anyone buying nicer audio stuff. And if you want to argue that
those numbers are "crumbs", knock yourself out.
"Because you threw out the $8 million figure as if it was relevant to your argument"
Actually it was closer to six million. And I didn't quote the actual figure, because with Kickstarter, it's never about the actual monies. Kickstarter is a sounding board. Think of it as how Sundance (nowadays it's more like South by Southwest) is for the film studios. There's not a whole lot of real money at the festivals, rather a road map for how to
make money. It's an invaluable tool for getting a finger on the pulse of what the public responds to.
"Remind me not to hire you for my marketing team"
You have a marketing team? Seriously?
"Pono wasn't a response to any demand from the market place. Pono and the Kickstarter campaign was all about creating demand through marketing"
To be fair, you do have a terrible marketing team, so you wouldn't know this. Suffice to say, one cannot create demand for a product people
actively don't want. That's very old-school ad-man thinking... Somebody's been binge-watching Mad Men. The most famous campaign held up to back that lame argument is the hula hoop. We all know the story, nobody wanted one, but it became a hit from the campaign, blah blah... Fact is, people wanted the hula hoop. It was the 50's, we'd all been through a terrible world war, the bombs might fall any second... Gyrating your hips like an idiot was stupid fun, and people wanted stupid fun. The campaign was solid, but again, people
wanted it. Despite the old adages, nobody can actually sell snowcones to an eskimo, my friend. People bought hi-rez music from Neil Young because they want hi-rez music. Period.
"And it was creating a demand for a dubious "product" (i.e. hi-res). To date I am not aware of anyone who has demonstrated unambiguously that anyone can hear the difference between 16/44 and 24/96-192."
With no one checking you before you make statements like that, I think your marketing team just went from being merely terrible to actively working against you. To be clear, PONO was not pitching 24/96-192 against 16/44, they were pitching 24/96-192 against MP3s or other highly compressed files... Like 256KB, for instance. Now here's why your marketing team should have cut you off... The average listener is going to be able to distinguish between a highly compressed music file and a lossless one far more easily than between, say, stock headphone cables and what you sell for $350. I won't tear down the aftermarket cable market, I enjoy my specialty cables as much as the next audiophile. But I certainly wouldn't bother buying them if all I was listening to was 256KB Apple Music files.
"I've been involved with the audiophile community for over 30 years. I don't know anything about it."
You know, normally I'd assume someone was being sarcastic with a statement like that.